“For most of history, the anonymous has been a woman.”
The Virginia Woolf quote seemed like a harbinger of the gender studies patterns that emerged throughout the two-hour Taylor Swift class taught at Northeastern University by Catherine Fairfield.
Dives headlong into gender roles, politics, witch hunts and what it means to be a roof-smashing mega-pop star, Fairfield introduced the class from her hometown home. Behind her, a royal purple banner 3 feet long “Speak Now (Taylor Version)” hanging from the wall. Why this album? Because the course title available to 527 students via Zoom is “Speak Now: Gender & Storytelling in Taylor Swift's Eras.”
“If we see that there are ideas, quotes or texts that are attributed to anonymous people,” Fairfield said, “there's a good chance, historically, that those might be from women and other disenfranchised people. That speaks very well to what we've been thinking about with the music industry, where we've seen how hard it is for women to get their footing as songwriters, rather than being the mouthpieces of male writers.”
The two-part course sets the tone for the year in academia with colleges teaching Swift not just as an example in a lesson plan but as a full curriculum. On topics ranging from economics to literature and psychology to gender studies, the “Mastermind” singer is boosting interest in college curricula.
“If we think about Taylor Swift,” Fairfield continues, “she holds that very rare place in the world with her success in getting stories heard, in making room for a real representation of a range of women's experiences that are really written by a woman .”
The session explored lyrics from the last five albums in Swift's discography: “Reputation” through “Midnights.”
“How old were you when Swift released 'Reputation'?” asked Fairfield. Most students put ages between 11 and 18 in conversation. There were some outliers, myself included, who saw the release of “Reputation” in 2017 as a nostalgic moment rather than a teenage rite of passage.
“It's been a tough time to be a Swiftie this year,” she said, referring to the public backlash, the firings, the media compliments adorned with digs and the assumptions made about Swift as a jilted ex-lover.
“The problem is anger,” he said, flashing a slide with an excerpt from the book “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger” by Soraya Chemaly:
“In the United States, anger toward white men is often portrayed as justified and patriotic, but toward black men as criminality. and to black women, as a threat. In the Western world … anger in women has been widely associated with 'madness'.
The course meandered through a meticulous analysis of Swift's music videos, lyrics and aesthetic.
“Thankfully it's 2024 and we've created a lot more room for women to be anti-heroes and to be complex characters in their own stories,” Fairfield said. “It took generations of writers pushing gender norms to get to where we are today.”
Follow Bryan West, USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter Instagram, Tik Tok and X as @BryanWestTV.
